POWERMAN 5000 Frontman Says Making New Albums 'Never Seems To Be A Comfortable Experience'

October 21, 2017

Ace Sims of Rock Revolt Magazine recently conducted an interview with POWERMAN 5000 frontman Spider One. You can listen to the entire chat below. A few excerpts follow (transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET).

On whether it feels like POWERMAN 5000 is “starting over” every time they release a new album:

Spider: “In some ways, it definitely keeps it exciting and interesting. But in some ways, it can be a level of frustration too because it feels like you’re always having to… you can never just relax. Maybe there are some bands that can kind of put their feet up and go, ‘Oh, we got this. It’s all good.’ I feel like every time we do it, we have to prove ourselves again and convince the radio station who played you the last time to play the new one. It’s always a challenge. It never seems to be a comfortable experience. But that’s okay. If it was, again, it could just get boring at that point.”

On the single “Sid Vicious In A Dress”:

Spider: “It’s funny. We made the record. We had the record done. You always get to that point of making an album, you go, ‘Okay, it’s done now. We can put this out. I feel good about it. Let’s write one more song just for fun.’ That’s what this song was. I was like, by the time you make a whole album, you end up with ten or eleven songs, but you’ve probably exhausted forty or fifty ideas, so by the time you get to that point, you’re a little bit burnt. It’s like, ‘What else do I have? What other ideas do I have?’ I went back to my notes in my folder and I had this song title ‘Sid Vicious In A Dress’ written down. I always felt, ‘Maybe if I ever write a song for someone else, that would be a good song to use.’ It’s not a POWERMAN song, but it kept coming back and so I said ‘Fuck it! That’s a POWERMAN song now.’ We tracked and wrote that song in an afternoon and it was no pressure kind of thing and it ended up being the first single, which is pretty crazy. Yeah, sonically, it’s a pretty straight-ahead POWERMAN song, but lyrically, it’s a little different. It’s a little tongue-in-cheek and maybe a simpler of a concept. I tend to sometimes be my own worst enemy lyrically and write these things and people are, like, ‘What the fuck does that mean?’ This one, there’s no mistaking what it’s about, although I must say, there is confusion. This, I never thought in a million years this would be confusing, but welcome to the Internet. In my mind, I thought, ‘Everybody knows who Sid Vicious is. He was the bass player for the SEX PISTOLS.’ Apparently, there was a WWE wrestler named Sid Vicious so people were going, ‘Why would they want to put the wrestler in a dress? I don’t get it.’ People were just all confused. So I was going ‘Oh, fuck.’ You think things couldn’t be any more confusing, but I was like ‘Okay.'”

On dealing with the constant changes in the music industry:

Spider: “It is really different. I do find myself talking about this a lot. Yeah, I’ve spent equal amount of time on whatever the line was here, 2004, or whenever things started changing. I’ve spent equal amount of time on both sides. It is different. It’s never been easy to be successful, but I find that back then, it wasn’t easy to find success, but the formula was at least simple. In other words, it was you could find a path. You’d be, like, ‘Okay, let’s start a band. Let’s become really good and popular in our hometown,’ which is what we did. We started in Boston. We just worked our asses off until we were basically the biggest band in Boston. Once you do that, because there was a real culture of A&R back then of guys from record labels seeking talent, you would get a deal. Basically, get popular, get a record deal, get on MTV and the radio and you’re going to be successful. Those things weren’t easy to do, but there was a clear path. Now, I don’t know what is fucking happening. I don’t think anybody really does. Those things like, ‘We got to get on this playlist on Spotify. We’ll do this…’ You find yourself talking about things that you don’t really care about. Whereas before, the culture was really centered around the music and you spent a lot of time talking about the music and things that I thought were cool. Even simple things like, ‘Oh, we got our posters in. They’re going to hang this poster in Tower Records.’ Stuff that you dreamed of as a kid, but now everything is sort of this intangible, digital thing floating around, it’s lost a little bit of the fun. That’s why I really look forward to going out and playing live because that’s when I get reminded more so that, ‘Yeah, I’m still in a fucking band.’ We are actually a band and not a hashtag or playlist or whatever it is.”

POWERMAN 5000‘s new album, “New Wave”, will be released on October 27 via Pavement Entertainment.